11. Yoga and writing: one: stages
By nature, the art of creativity is a painful process. Each act of creation has its own pangs. It requires preparation, mental flexibility, sometimes hard diligent labour. Phases of fear, discomfort, tension, frustration and dejection invade the mind of the artist and kill his interest. These have to be accepted as unavoidable accompaniments on the hazardous and arduous journey of artistic creation. Unshaken, the artist must continually labour long (nirantarabhuasa), and use his own ethical code (yama and niyama), sensitive intellect (buddhi), right reasoning and judgement (savicara and vivecana) to reach the desired goal. Then his intuitive intelligence (sahaja jnana) and inner vision (antardrsti) attain the highest order of clear perception. (Iyengar 1985:9)
Beginning
You enter the yoga room. You see people doing their practice. They stand on their heads, stand on their arms, turn their bodies in improbable twists and bends. You think I can't do that! and the thought is a despairing one. And then your teacher says, 'Once, they couldn't do it either.'
You start. You do a little, do what you can. Next time you do a little more. It's obvious, isn't it?
You start. You stand in the first standing pose, Tadasana. Just stand. Stand straight. Stand straight and still. And begin to learn all the adjustments you can make – balance, symmetry, alignment, ascension. The adjustments you make even in this pose, the awareness you bring to it, can be refined infinitely.
You only need one asana to understand asana as you only need one poem to understand poetry.
You start. You remember what Hemingway said: All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know. You write a sentence. You rewrite the sentence. You write the sentence another way. You begin to know the ways just one sentence can be written.
Commitment
So you have taken the first step and another step. And then one day, the next step crosses a line. Yoga says, 'You can't just 'try it and see' any more. It won't work until you dedicate a portion, a part, of your life.'
This is the moment of choice. This is the commitment.
Why is she in a crowded yoga room with stained ropes and wooden blocks and black rubber mats and strange people? She thinks of it with dread.
But if it is Monday Pandora does not go to her bus when she alights from the train between her city job and her beach home. She walks past department stores, buses grinding to a halt, to a doorway next to a toyshop, climbs the stairs. Men and women are stripping off their day clothes, some struggling for modesty as they pull on tights and T-shirts.
Sometimes an odour remains from the previous class, a smell of endeavor and anxiety, wafted away in clouds of lavender oil. Barbara is a high priestess in here and the pictures lining the top of the wall above the ropes, they show, you can't say a god, something more than a teacher. A guru. Astounding in each of sixty-four asana. (Neem Dreams)
Once upon a time writing said to me, 'Get serious! We can't have an on and off relationship, waiting for your other jobs to give you time. You might need to earn less money for now, I need all of you. One day I'll look after you but I can't tell you how long it will take.'
Your guru is your practice
'So, are you a guru?' I asked Mr Iyengar. I had been going to Iyengar yoga classes for three years, and B.K.S. Iyengar was visiting Australia for the first time. I was making a one-hour program on yoga for ABC Radio and interviewed the great master. He replied, 'Your guru is your practice.'
The greatest thing a guru could ever say.
You learn to do it by doing it.
Yoga is learnt in the practice of yoga and writing is learnt in the practice of writing.
Then what is learnt in the classroom?
Teachers
A writer is taught what thought and language are capable of through reading, conversation, reading, life, reading. Yoga is taught through practice, example, readings.
A teacher of writing or of yoga shows you what more you can do, what you haven't noticed, where you are cheating yourself by holding back.
You teach by learning, you learn by teaching, and each time you find that out it seems like it's news.
Masters
Beyond the teachers there are the masters. There are writers so great that you fall to the floor while reading them. If you are not intimidated you are inspired. Shakespeare – as near indisputable as a writer ever gets – shows you a kind of perfection. Mr Iyengar shows you a kind of perfection, a vision of what is possible, a sense that we are participating in something...I want to call it divine, I don't want to call it divine.
Discipline
Once a week to begin. After a while I'd get up and go to the early morning class even if I'd had a late night, had a hangover, left someone in my bed. Even if I didn't feel like going I'd find myself showered and dressed and on the early-morning street on the way. After a while I wasn't having all that many late nights anymore, drank on fewer occasions and there were more blue moons than shared beds.
Once a week, then twice, then more. During my last few years in Sydney I went to my yoga school six days a week, for a two-hour practice or class.
You get the discipline to do so much yoga from doing yoga.
Writing begins with irresistible urges. It continues with practice. It's not only when you feel like it, not only when that rare angel inspiration comes calling, not only when you're needing to say something or needing to find what you will say. Now it's every day. Now it's the set time and place and no, you're not free to go out for a drink and no, it's not okay to come by without phoning first, even you, darling. Because I write. I write every day. I don't always feel like it. It is what I do.
You can't always leave the phone to ring and the door to rattle and the others to have their long boozy lunches without you. Have a life. Life calls, go to it.
In a lecture given in 1997, Mr Iyengar says:
Even such great yogis, who practiced and mastered yoga, kept these two main pleasures of the world – artha, which means economy to lead a pleasurable life, that is finance which brings joy to a person and kama, the lust, the sensual joy – within the border of right living. These are two of the four aims in life as passed on by the Rishis of yoga. They have not said 'Renounce'. Unfortunately what you hear from the neo-yogis is the word 'Renounce'. But the geniuses have not said 'Renounce'. On the contrary they have said to enjoy the worldly joys with discipline, limiting them within the banks of right living – dharma on one side and the liberation from that sensual net – moksa, on the other side. (Iyengar 1999b:8)
Eventually your discipline is not forced and it is not denial. It is your priority, not your sacrifice.
Never-ending refinement
You never get there. There is always some refinement possible. (A poem is not finished, it is abandoned.) No creative work is finished; it only ever is abandoned.
Plateaus
You are not making any progress. Nothing happens, nothing improves, nothing changes. You can't even do what you did before. Demons called Frustration and Despair crash the party.
This is a stage. This is necessary. This you can learn from. This is where you are, so be here. Back to basics. Learn again just to stand still and straight. Remind yourself of all the simplest adjustments.
You can't write a new sentence worth writing. So look at the sentence you already wrote. Take it apart and put it together again.
As a woman approaching menopause I am learning that I can't expect to make any obvious progress in my yoga practice. Simply to maintain is a kind of progress, as it will be into age. And while the progress is not outwardly obvious, there is still a deepening, a refining of the practice, more levels of understanding. Writing should always get better.
Flexibility, instinct
Discipline does not mean rigidity. When are there rules and when are there no rules?
It's backbends week but you have your period so you had better do passive poses. It's forward bends week but you need the particular energy re
leased by backbends. You had a sequence planned but the weather has dramatically changed and it will be better to find a new practice suitable for today's conditions.
B.K.S. Iyengar says:
...if the body refuses then I will work some other way. I make my body to be friendly with me. That may take 20 minutes, 30 minutes. This is the time or duration in which one has to watch the state of one's self, in order to awaken that intelligence of the body... Never miss or drop the practice. You have to find alternatives ... (Iyengar 1999b:16)
You are stuck in this story, it is just not happening. Are you really going to force yourself to sit at your desk until one o'clock because that is your rule? Today you need to go and sit under a tree. You need to write at night instead, write somewhere else, write something else, not write at all today. You are not missing or dropping your practice, you are finding alternatives. Write a letter. Write something you would never show anyone. Write as if you were someone else. Get drunk, talk to a stranger. Fall asleep and dream.
Risk and reward, aim and by-product
It's all risk and no reward at first and then once again and undoubtedly some more. All you can do, should do, is get better at what you do.
In the Bhagavad Gita we are told over and over that we must perform our actions for the sake of the action and not for the fruit of the action.
The reward is not the day you do a headstand at last. It's getting there, it's the importance of each step, each decision.
The reward of writing is not publication. (In fact it has been more truly said that publication is the price you pay for writing.) Anyway, by the time publication comes, the questions of some new work are what is absorbing you.
You may begin to do yoga for the sake of better health, calmness, to lose weight, because your girlfriend does it:
[Y]oga is not a therapeutic science at all. Yoga is a science for liberating the soul by bringing the consciousness, the mind and the body to a state of integration. But when a factory [makes] a certain product for marketing, fortunately or unfortunately many other products may incidentally be produced, and may also have market value. So it is possible to forget the original...and produce only the by-products to sell on the market. Similarly, though the aim and culmination of yoga is the sight of the soul, it has lots of beneficial side effects, among which are health, happiness, peace and poise.(Iyengar 1988:85)
Writing has what we may call its side effects: publication, major or minor fame, invitations to read at conferences. You may earn enough money to buy a fabulous house or you may earn enough money to buy a new typewriter. No doubt these rewards are in the sights of many writers especially, or maybe only, as they begin.
Now, I'm not going to say that the real aim of writing is the sight of the soul. Ask writers why they write and they will tell you the answers you can find in all those books of interviews we collect. We write because we must. We write because we can. As for the soul, well, we don't have to talk about the soul. Actually we may have to. I will get to the soul later.
But you go back to Hemingway's first lesson, Write one true sentence, and you may find that to do so becomes the quest of a lifetime.
The Shadow, the unknown
You are discovering the shadows cast by the light. Who are you trusting when you keep discovering you distrust? Pain and tears! Just when you thought it was getting to be fun, just when you imagined life was sweetness. So it is because of the bitterness and darkness. Not without them. I'm not sure I'll ever quite understand this, the way 'it' – the reason we do it, the reward for doing it – is found in imperfection and not only in perfection.
The body; body and mind; union
The writing body is a body held too long in unnatural positions, cramped, still, hunched, and sacrificed.
Sacrificed to the life of the mind. The body is a poor tortured instrument.
It has become commonplace to criticise Cartesian dualism, the separation of body and mind, and our health practices and cultural theories continue to develop from the premise of a desirable integration. We understand the body as discursively produced, its actual physical being and the understanding we bring to it as a product of culture.
Yoga in its way also understands the body as a product of past thoughts and experiences, and its practice re-shapes your experience of your body through a deliberate set of new experiences and thoughts. These are known as samskara: the accumulated residue of past thoughts and actions.
Think of the body as a text written by yoga, and the self as a text written by your writing.
This is not how you begin the study of yoga. Patanjali talks of four stages: In a beginner the mind will always run on the surface, which is the physical body, and in this first stage you work with concentration and determination, looking only at parts of your body. It is only later that the mind begins to feel the action, then become more intimately acquainted with it, and looks at both the parts and the whole.
When that happens, the experience of yoga's famous union between mind and body begins.
And do you glimpse the soul?
It is extraordinary to experience your self as other than the chattering mind, as other than mind. If the mind is stilled, what or where is the self? If you are observing yourself, who is observing, who is being observed?
Writing depends on the flow of thoughts from the unconscious a great deal, and you might wonder which is the truer self, the unconscious or its servant who takes its dictation then edits it. Writing learns from dreams, and dreams tell us we are mysterious to ourselves. Somewhere in this arena we need an idea we call the soul, that part of us that connects to the mystery.
Transcendence
The very first yoga sutra of Patanjali says, 'Yoga is the cessation of movements in the consciousness' or, in another translation, 'Yoga is the inhibition of the modifications of the mind'
This seems contrary to anything writing could possibly aim for, where movements of the mind are very much what it's all about, and what you really want is for your mind to move right into some wildly wonderful new space of language.
But in the absorption of the self into the act of writing there is a kind of stillness in the frenzy, and who has not read over a piece of writing they have produced and said, awed, Could I have done that, my god where did that come from?
Transcendence cannot be an aim. It is like Zen Archery, hitting the target when you're not trying too hard to hit the target. It disappears with the thought that you have attained it.